CUDA-Based SSA Method in Application to Calculating EM Scattering From Large Two-Dimensional Rough Surface

The small slop approximation (SSA) is an accurate method to calculate the electromagnetic (EM) scattering properties of rough surfaces. However, its computational complexity restricts its application to smaller domains and there is always the need for speedup in very large cases using pure central processing units (CPUs) hardware. With the development of graphics processing units (GPUs), more processors are dedicated to perform independent calculations. In addition, NVIDIA introduced a parallel computing platform, compute unified device architecture (CUDA), which provides researchers an easy way to use processors on GPU. To calculate EM scattering properties on GPU, we reformulate the SSA method with CUDA to take advantage of GPU threads. Because each thread executes synchronously and deals with a corresponding point data of rough surface, the CUDA-based SSA method calculates faster than the pure-CPU equivalent. To overcome memory limitations, the data of large rough surface are stored on hard disk. Moreover, a subsidiary thread is used to deal with the process of data transmission between the memory and the hard disk and reduce transmitting time further. The factors, block size, data transfers, and register, are also discussed in the optimization of the CUDA application. Test cases running on a NVIDIA GTX 460 GPU indicate that two orders of magnitude speedup, including file input and output, is obtained with our new formulation.